What if this war should end, as it must, not by a cease-fire or a truce, like other wars with Hamas, but with a comprehensive resolution to the 100-year-old conflict between the Palestinian and Israeli people?

To imagine anything good coming out of such a destructive war is not easy, especially for those of us witnessing its cruel prosecution from Ramallah, on the Israeli-occupied West Bank. And yet, as bad as things are, I feel compelled to resist giving in to despair. I may be clutching at straws, but I feel a moral responsibility to seek any grounds for hope.

One hopeful sign I detect is the recurring mention of the Nakba, as Palestinians call their tragedy during the 1948 war, when more than 700,000 people were forced to leave their home and become refugees. Israel has never officially recognized this collective catastrophe—largely because the Zionist movement, from its early days, denied the existence of the Palestinian people and consequently refused to recognize the Nakba.

Admittedly, today’s recognition is at best backhanded and at worst threatening. It points not to restitution but to repetition. On October 8, the Israeli Knesset member Ariel Kallner posted on X (formerly Twitter): “Right now, one goal: Nakba! A Nakba that will overshadow the Nakba of 48.” Violent Israeli settlers in the West Bank distributed pamphlets on October 26, warning of a second Nakba for the Palestinians: “You have a last opportunity to escape to Jordan. Afterward, we’ll drive you away by force from our holy land that God dedicated to us.”

[Graeme Wood: ‘You started a war, you’ll get a Nakba’]

I take some cold comfort from the recognition of the Nakba that this ugly rhetoric contains, in spite of itself. For decades, Israeli propaganda justified the exodus of three-quarters of the Palestinian population in 1948 with various claims; one—the contention that Palestinians left primarily because Arab leaders called on them to do so, rather than because of Jewish terrorism and systematic ethnic cleansing—has been rebutted by several generations of scholars.

Another persistent Israeli line held that the Palestinian Arabs had 21 Arab states to go to, while Israeli Jews had only one state. David Ben-Gurion, a 1948 war leader and Israel’s first prime minister, believed that after a few generations Palestinians would have integrated into new host countries and forgotten about Palestine. But 75 years after the Palestinians were pushed out of their home in Palestine, they continue to believe in the possibility of return, and many remain in the refugee camps where they were settled after the Nakba in the West Bank, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, and Gaza.

Before 1948, many Palestinians saw the Jews as a tiny minority who would never be able to establish a state in Palestine. The famous Palestinian educator Khalil Sakakini, who worked as an educational inspector under the British Mandate, describes in a 1934 diary entry a trip he took throughout the country. He wrote: “If the Jews have a few impoverished colonies, the Arabs have thousands of villages … What is owned by the Jews compares as nothing to what is owned by the Arabs in Palestine.” The Palestinians also believed that they had the backing of the Arab states, which would help them quash the Jewish dream of establishing a state in Palestine.

Before the 1948 war, few Palestinians were aware of the extent of European Jews’ suffering in the Holocaust, or of how that experience affected the survivors who immigrated to Palestine—the insecurity and dread that blunted them to the feelings of Palestinians and engendered extreme determination to succeed in their nation-building project. Likewise, after 1948, the Israelis failed to understand the enduring meaning of the Nakba for the Palestinians.

Despite this history, and in addition to the almost inadvertent recent recognition of the Nakba, I see a second, slender ground for optimism arising out of the terrible violence.

“When this crisis is over, there has to be a vision of what comes next … There’s no going back to the status quo as it stood on October 6,” President Joe Biden told reporters. The White House said that Biden conveyed the same message directly to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu during a telephone call.

We Palestinians have heard such invocations before, and they have proved empty promises. Even now, the United States, Israel’s staunchest ally, continues to block the UN Security Council from calling for a humanitarian cease-fire. But maybe, just maybe, after this latest horrific cycle of violence, the United States and the rest of the international community will follow through.

The Oslo Accords of 1993 are often viewed as a development that could have brought real peace, if not for the assassination of then–Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin by a right-wing Israeli fanatic. Yet Oslo was largely a false beginning. From the start, Israeli extremists denounced the agreement because it would force them to relinquish parts of “Greater Israel,” which they considered to be their God-given land. After the accords were signed, they built settlements on occupied Palestinian land at a faster pace than ever before. Some on the Israeli left opposed this policy, but to little avail.

In the aftermath of what was supposed to be a historic peace accord, therefore, Palestinians witnessed the loss of ever more land to Israeli settlements on the West Bank. They saw Israel withdraw from Gaza, only to impose a tight blockade restricting the movement of people and goods and affecting every aspect of life in the strip. These developments together gave credence to the argument, propounded by Hamas, that only through armed struggle would Palestinian rights be restored.

The mirror image of this view is the prevailing Israeli belief that only military action can defeat Hamas. To destroy Hamas will be impossible without ending the occupation of the West Bank and the siege of Gaza. Israel should know this from long experience, but instead persists in the delusion that Hamas’s appeal can be reversed without offering an alternative vision for a path to Palestinian freedom.

[Hussein Ibish: Israel’s dangerous delusion]

The Oslo Agreement established the Palestinian Authority, whose moderate head, Mahmoud Abbas, espoused nonviolent resistance to the Israeli occupation and to denounce violence. He was willing to settle for a smaller state and to struggle through peaceful and legal means to achieve it. Yet Netanyahu cynically supported Hamas in Gaza to make sure that the PA would not succeed. The PA, for its part, became unpopular because of its corruption, its security cooperation with Israel, and its failure to protect the Palestinians in the West Bank.

Now Israel is waging a destructive war against Hamas in Gaza that will carry a high economic cost, as well as a high reputational cost around the globe. Although Western governments proclaimed their solidarity with Israel after the October 7 horror, many are urging Israel to exercise restraint, and to cooperate with the provision of humanitarian aid. If the United States continues opposing calls for a cease-fire as the war goes on, it may find itself isolated even among its Western allies.

Israel/Palestine is a small, precious land with lovely beaches in Gaza; soft, attractive hills in the West Bank; and sites of exquisite beauty in Israel. But its people, rather than enjoying their mutual land for its bounty, are tormented by exclusivist attitudes and policies that stretch the limit of their endurance. The vision that peace could follow the eviction or destruction of one people, whether through a second Nakba or through bombing, is cruel and false.

Unfortunately, the United States’ policy is one of blind support for Israel. Over the years, Washington has failed to convince its ally that choosing the path of peace with the Palestinians through recognition of their rights is best for the future of all—for ending the violence, and for the possibility that one day, the two nations of Israelis and Palestinians can live together in peace and security.

When Governor Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania announced in September that the nation’s largest swing state would implement automatic voter registration, Donald Trump threw a conniption. “Pennsylvania is at it again!” the former president posted on Truth Social, his social-media platform. The switch, Trump said, would be “a disaster for the Election of Republicans, including your favorite President, ME!”

Trump’s panic is consistent with his (baseless) view that any reforms designed to increase voter turnout, such as expanding mail balloting and early voting, are part of a Democratic conspiracy to rig elections in their favor. But he may be wrong to fear automatic voter registration: Although Shapiro is a Democrat, if either party stands to gain from his move, it’s likely to be the GOP. In Pennsylvania, the reform “really has a potential to lean more Republican,” Seo-young Silvia Kim, an elections expert who has studied the system, told me. It’s “not great news for Democrats.”

First implemented in Oregon in 2016, automatic voter registration is now used in 23 states, including three—Alaska, Georgia, and West Virginia—that are governed by Republicans. Rather than requiring citizens to proactively register to vote, some states that use the system automatically enroll people who meet eligibility requirements and then give them the option to decline or opt out. The shift is subtler in Pennsylvania; the state has simply started prompting people to register to vote when they obtain a new or renewed driver’s license or state ID.

[David A. Graham: Actually good news about voting, for a change]

The seemingly minor change, which voting-rights advocates still place under the umbrella of “automatic” registration, is based on behavioral research showing that people are less likely to opt out of a choice than to opt in. By including voter registration as part of a commonly used process such as obtaining a driver’s license—and by presenting it as the default option rather than a form that citizens have to request—states have found that they can increase both registration and turnout in elections. “Even though the process isn’t that big of a shift, the effects are great,” Greta Bedekovics, the associate director of democracy policy at the left-leaning Center for American Progress, told me.

Democrats have led the move toward automatic voter registration, and their 2021 comprehensive voting-rights legislation known as the For the People Act included a requirement that state-elections chiefs implement the policy. (The bill died in the Senate.) But automatic registration does not inherently favor one party or the other, and it has appealed to Republicans in some states because it helps officials clean up voter rolls and safeguard elections. “I don’t know who it will help, and that’s kind of the point,” Sean Morales-Doyle, the director of the voting-rights program at NYU’s Brennan Center for Justice, told me.

A 2017 study by the Center for American Progress found that the voters who enrolled through Oregon’s automatic-registration system were more likely to be younger, more rural, lower income, and more ethnically diverse than the electorate as a whole—a demographic mix that suggests that Republicans might have benefited as much as Democrats.

Other research shows a more partisan advantage. While an assistant professor at American University in 2018, Kim, the elections expert, studied the effects of automatic registration in Orange County, California, the site of several hard-fought congressional races that year. She found that among residents who needed to update their registration because they had moved within the county, automatic registration resulted in no meaningful shift for Democrats. But it substantially boosted turnout among Republicans and independents—by 8.1 points and 7.4 points, respectively. “I was actually very surprised,” Kim said, adding that she’d expected that if any party gained, it would be Democrats. She suspects that Democrats may have been unaffected by the change because in 2018, they were already motivated to vote by Trump’s recent election.

The impact of automatic registration on any one election is likely to be marginal, but even small shifts could be significant in a state such as Pennsylvania, where less than one percentage point separated Trump from Hillary Clinton in 2016 and just more than one point separated Joe Biden from Trump four years later. Several factors suggest that the new system could benefit the GOP in Pennsylvania. Although Democrats have more registered voters in the state, Republicans have been closing the gap during the Trump era as more white working-class and rural voters who stopped voting for Democrats years ago have chosen to join the GOP. Democrats have countered that drift by capturing wealthier suburban voters, a group that helped Shapiro and first-term Democratic Senator John Fetterman win their races during last year’s midterm elections. Because this demographic already goes to the polls pretty reliably, though, automatic registration is more likely to boost turnout among the right-leaning rural working class.

An early-2020 study also suggested that the GOP stood to gain from higher voter turnout in Pennsylvania. The Knight Foundation surveyed 12,000 “chronic non-voters” nationwide before Democrats had settled on Biden as their nominee. Across the country, nonvoters said that if they cast a ballot, they would support the Democratic candidate over Trump by a slim margin, 33 percent to 30 percent. But in Pennsylvania, nonvoters went strongly in the other direction: By a 36–28 percent margin, they said they’d prefer Trump over the Democrat. The eight-point gap was the second largest (after Arizona) in favor of Trump in any of the 10 swing states that the organization polled.

[Jerusalem Demsas: Americans vote too much]

“Democrats sometimes have the mistaken opinion that anybody that doesn’t show up is going to vote Democrat,” Mike Mikus, a longtime Democratic strategist in Pennsylvania, told me. “It’s been one of the myths in Democratic circles for years. Quite frankly, given the changing of the respective party bases, it makes sense that [automatic registration] may somewhat benefit Republicans.” Other recent polls have suggested that the political realignment of the Trump era has made the GOP more reliant on infrequent voters.

The place where Democrats could most use stronger turnout—particularly among the party’s base of Black voters—is Philadelphia, which provided about one-sixth of Biden’s statewide vote in 2020. The city had higher turnout than Pennsylvania as a whole in both 2008 and 2012, when Barack Obama led the Democratic ticket, but it has lagged further and further behind in each election since. Last year, turnout in Philadelphia was just 43 percent, compared with 54 percent statewide.

Yet automatic voter registration might have less impact in Philadelphia than in other parts of the state. Studies have found that the switch drives higher turnout outside urban areas, where Democratic voters are most concentrated. That’s partly because automatic voter registration is operated through the state Department of Motor Vehicles—an agency with which people who rely on public transit are less likely to interact. For that reason, when New York implemented automatic registration in 2020, voting-rights advocates lobbied aggressively for the state to enroll voters through other agencies in addition to the DMV; as of 2018, a majority of the more than 3 million households in New York City did not own a car.

Pennsylvania has no plans to implement automatic voter registration beyond the state DMV. Democrats have been adamant that in enacting the new system, Shapiro was not trying to benefit his party but merely trying to reach the 1.6 million Keystone State residents who are eligible but not registered to vote. Although Republicans argued that the change should have gone through the state legislature, they have not formally challenged automatic registration in court. Few of them seemed to agree with Trump that the reform would doom the GOP. “Its impact will be somewhere between inconsequential and a nothingburger,” Christopher Nicholas, a Republican consultant in Pennsylvania, told me.

Democrats say it’s too early to assess the electoral impact of automatic voter registration, but they acknowledged that Republicans might gain more voters as a result. More than 13,500 Pennsylvanians registered to vote through the new system during its first six weeks of implementation, according to numbers provided by the Shapiro administration. Of that total, Republicans added about 100 more voters than Democrats. “Our former president is almost always wrong,” Joanna McClinton, who leads a narrow Democratic majority as the speaker of the Pennsylvania state House, told me. The fact that Trump is so opposed to the reform, she said, “reveals something we’ve always known, which is Republicans want to keep the electorate small, selective, and they don’t want to expand access to voting even if they could be the beneficiaries of it.”

Whether Trump regains the presidency next year could hinge on the tightest of margins in Pennsylvania. I asked McClinton if she worried that by implementing automatic voter registration, Shapiro had unintentionally bestowed an electoral gift on Republicans ahead of an enormously significant election. McClinton didn’t hesitate. “Not at all,” she replied quickly. “I look forward to seeing the full data, but I definitely am not looking at this from a political perspective but from a big-D democracy perspective.”

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